Professor Andrea Reiter (1957-2018)

With the untimely death of our colleague Professor Andrea Reiter after a long illness courageously borne, the Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies at the IMLR has lost a much valued and respected member. Andrea was a member of our committee for over ten years. She never stinted in travelling to London from Southampton, where she taught at the University, to attend events and meetings held by the Research Centre, and she contributed fully to its activities. She was co-editor (with Anthony Grenville) of two volumes of the Yearbook of the Research Centre: ‘I Didn’t Want to Float; I Wanted to Belong to Something’: Refugee Organizations in Britain 1933-1945 (2008) and Political Exile and Exile Politics in Britain after 1933 (2011).

Andrea Reiter graduated in German literature at the University of Salzburg, where she also gained her PhD. One of the scholars from the German-speaking world who so greatly enrich the discipline of German Studies in Britain, she settled at the University of Southampton, where she was promoted to the rank of Professor. She ranged widely across the field of modern German, and especially Austrian, literature. Her many publications reflect her interests, including the relationship between centre and periphery, as in her study of the intellectual exile Hans Sahl Die Exterritorialität des Denkens: Hans Sahl im Exil (2007), the Holocaust, as in Narrating the Holocaust (2005), and Austrian Jewish writers and intellectuals, as  in Contemporary Jewish Writing: Austria after Waldheim (2013).

Andrea was a dedicated and gifted academic whose cultured intellect brightened many a conversation and was also evident when she spoke, lectured or wrote. She will be much missed.

^{Anthony Grenville}